She is 30 now, but it’s the mixture of her adult courage and occasional child-like language that is so jarring.

At one point Tuesday, testifying with a support dog by her feet at the Toronto trial of Martin Galloway, one of the strangers who allegedly sexually assaulted her, she was describing her family’s “Family Nights” or “Family Days.”

The kids — she was about 12 then, the oldest of three — and their mother and her husband, the children’s stepfather, would gather in the living room to watch TV.

(There is a court-ordered publication ban on the children’s names, or any information that could identify them.)

The kids, well-groomed by the wretched adults by now, would be “encouraged to perform sex on each other.” She, for instance, remembered fingering her mother, performing oral sex on the little brother of whom she was instinctively so protective.

And then there were the video chats, “with other people,” as she put it, “pedophiles and what-not.” Strangers, watching online and sometimes ordering the stepfather to do certain things to the girl, would sometimes be invited “over to assault me.”

Galloway, a 58-year-old married father of three, allegedly was one of three men who were so invited.

He is pleading not guilty, and indeed, when he was arrested by Toronto Police at his London, Ont., home on Jan. 25, 2017 and later then told by detectives of the specific allegations against him, he replied in his soft Scottish burr, “I beg your pardon? Excuse me? That’s preposterous… .I’m not prepared to answer any more questions.”

One of the other strangers who was invited to the couple’s London home, Jason Dickens of Toronto, already has pleaded guilty to a number of child pornography offences, including one for an assault on the young woman now in the witness stand. His wife, Dylan McEwen, has also been convicted of similar offences, including one video where she masturbated with a baby bottle while feeding the baby.

Jason Dickens and his wife Dylan McEwen have already been found guilty of a number of child pornography offences.Toronto Police Service

The third stranger, who now lives as a woman but was a man, is awaiting a decision next week on sexual assault and sexual interference charges.

All but Galloway, who admits only to a passing interest in BDSM (Bondage, Dominance, Sado-Masochism, though the girl knew it as Bondage Dominance, Slave Master) when he was young and single, were deeply involved in BDSM.

Yet in an online blog he apparently kept and which is now in evidence before Ontario Court Judge Louise Botham, Galloway said in a 2003 entry that he was entering “my 9th year of my ‘coming out’ predicament,” which he explained meant his secret underground life in BDSM and his “vanilla” relationship life.

The young woman’s mother has been convicted for sexually abusing her and her brother. The stepfather is awaiting trial.

It was an unimaginably ghastly childhood, especially given that for the first years, the family lived in a small northern town.

As the young woman put it, “We lived in poverty, but we didn’t know that.”

There, the mother had no boyfriend and various relatives lived nearby.

It was about Christmas of 2000, the young woman said, when her mother met the man who became her stepfather. From that year until she finished high school (in a competitive academic stream) and moved away, the abuse waxed and waned (at one point, her mother had decided she wanted a new master) but allegedly continued for six years.

Jacquelyn Laronde, formerly Sean O’Toole, is awaiting judgment on sexual assault and sexual interference charges in this case.Toronto Police Service

Despite all that had happened to her, despite all that she’d been trained to do, despite what she saw and the pictures in her head, despite a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and years of therapy to come to terms with the shame, she finished university.

She began her cross-examination by Daniel Brown, Galloway’s lawyer, and it’s clear she has sometimes lied to police or even a court in one or another of the other proceedings (mostly to protect her mother), and that her memory has sometimes shifted.

“I was still afraid to portray my mom as an abuser on her own,” she told the judge.

But “becoming a mother myself,” she said, helped her realize that “as a victim yourself you still have the responsibility to protect your child.” There was also her residual gratitude at her mother having given her “a good life,” however briefly, in the small northern town.

Now, she says, with her mother there “are lots of strains and boundaries to maintain. I have to be sure to protect my child.